Seeds
One of my students has started a blog, after I introduced her class to blogs in three hectic days. Her initiation is through frustration - she was outraged with how the editor treated some of her writing in an online college news-service - but quickly flows into wonder about the modern society, technology, and life as a young woman at the start of her career. In this post she links to an article in aftenposten.no, concerning the reality of being young, female, a mother and professional. In the article the younger women attack the older generation, saying that they should have been warned! At the age of 30 they have education, good jobs and kids, and discover that the modern society isn't built for that many tasks. Children can not be managed away, and the workplace or the economy has no room for caring for children. Why didn't the older feminists tell them?

For long periods I have been the only woman teaching in the Media Department at Volda College. It is a job where it is expected that you work more than a full day. Taking work home is second nature. Spending afternoons preparing or updating on subjects I need to know about is a lifestyle. I have tried to warn class after class of girls about the attitudes and demands of society, still lingering out there. They have told me that feminism has nothing to do with them. They can have education, jobs and all the sex they like, same as their fellow male students. Feminism is for manhating lesbians or angry, disappointed, bitter bitches.

I wish that was true. I want to tell the girls that the shame psychologist Sissel Gran reports from her flood of letters from unhappy young women is needless. In these letters, the young women write how they feel. They "ought to" shut up and be grateful that they have an equal chance at work and family. But it isn't like that yet. Their problems are real. Their struggles are real. The inequality is real. It may however be time to realise that men are as trapped as women in the time-trap. It is time to liberate the men and say it is permitted for them to take their time with their children. Norwegian legislation puts increasing emphasis on this, and men are slowly starting to take advantage of that. It doesn't help single mothers right away, but these changes take time.

And girls - I am sure somebody tried to warn you it would be rough. But shame is a very efficient tool of oppression. "Shut up and be grateful" still works.

La Napa
The White House had Disinvited the Poets, a poem about why poets can not be permitted to protest in The White House. By way of Culture Cat.

Trust
By way of Knowledge Bridge: The Mechanics of Human Trust. The claim that Academic publishing inhibits the free flow of knowledge is an interesting read too.

Territorial software
Zephoria (Danah Boyd) has a pretty good vent about Orkut at Apophenia (found by way of kottke), and she has a nice long list of links to people commenting on it. The criticism about Orkut is interesting, not because I think social networking sites are all that significant at this point in digital history, but because this criticism makes me realise why the student/teacher network used by several Norwegian Universities and Colleges doesn't work.

Classfronter, a site for submitting papers, relaying messages, keeping calendars etc has some features that work. That is mainly the submitting papers and relaying messages from teachers to students part. The parts that don't really work are all those social features, which are aimed at making Classfronter into an online classroom. It has your personalised profile, your "who is online now" feature, your discussion lists, your potential new groups and rooms - and nobody uses it. My students are active, at times aggressive students, used to being in the top end of their class, skilled at finding channels for gathering and spreading information, and they just don't care about that medium. Why not? In Danah Boyd's vent not one of her problems are the same as with Classfronter, but I still think she is one the right track. Both Orkut and Classfronter are parodies of social interaction.

Classfronter is a mockery of the classroom situation. In the flesh world, if my students are in the classroom and they whisper or chat, that affects everybody and so is significant. It isn't just a matter of exchanging information, it is a way to express contempt, disgust and aggression, or just plain tell me they are bored. These actions influence me directly. In Classfronter, I can't even know if they are in the classroom unless they chat with me. And while their activity may stretch over a full spectre, I may never know. If they want to discuss anything at length, they need to email me anyway. Emailing me through Classfronter sends an email to my mailbox or to classfronter depending on my specifications. I can't lecture in there, I can post lectures and then listen to comments on them, that is all. No feedback, no nods, no snores, no enthusiasm. We don't really interact. A MUD or a MOO gives me a much better idea of social interaction, attendance, attention and general noise level of a class if I want to interact with students online.

Orkut is the same kind of place as Classfronter. Rather than posting papers we post comments and suggestions to groups, but the useful functions for actually communicating are all different versions of reciprocal delayed communication based on turn-taking. The social trimmings are as mangled in Orkut as in Classfronter. That I have accepted somebody as my friend doesn't mean my social interactions with those people are in that space, any more than me posting my lecture on Classfronter means I actually lecture through that digital classroom. And don't get me started on administrators who can't think around routines in order to facilitate function... At least Orkut is in Alpha and we haven't paid hard-earned educational budget money for the thing.

The main problem is, in my opinion, is that you need to move from one online territory to an other. This might be a topic for Anne's Space and Culture blog, because I think of sites like Orkut, Friendster and our own Classfronter as territorial. They want to keep the attention of the user limited to their territories, and will not allow a frontierless surfing and simultaneous use. They insist that you identify yourself upon return or keep your link-economy within their control. Well, I can circumvent that through keeping more windows open, but linking out of sites and being able to return to them smoothly is important to my surfing habits, and filling the screen with opened windows just isn't the solution.

Both Orkut and Classfronter are about controlling surfing habits and internet use. They both try to mimic and hardcode certain social interaction structures and aspects that are too subtle and too fluid for binary programming language. They both fail miserably and make a lot of people angry and upset in the process. "Interesting" is the best thing to say about them. But really - they are, as long as you don't expect them to actually work.

Oddly connected
Playing around in google (yes, yes, I admit it, I occasionally google myself just to enjoy the buzz), I found a link to a student in the early stages of planning her research. Anne K Jones at The Dump reads blogs around the world and stumbles (her word) into the scandinavian blog cluster. With a little bit of reading she finds herself oddly connected to the bloggers of the world, realising with surprise that she doesn't know any of us.

With all the definitions, all the restrictions to what blogging is and isn't, the attempts at creating significant networks and sources for disseminating all that wonderfully important information we are so blessed with, we tend to forget exactly that. Blogs connect us. It connects all of us, on good days and bad days.

We may discuss weblogs as alternative knowledge publishing, as Sebastien Paquet does in this article from October 2002, or we may discuss them through dissecting form and technical aspects, as does Dave Winer. But what makes this a differetn way of publishing for me isn't about either political strategies of formal rules. It is about common humanity and sharing experiences.

Yes, we do feel close to those whose weblogs we read. And when it gets close, it gets personal to the point that we feel both happy, worried and hurt from what we read in the blogs of our blog-friends. Human beings are emotional creatures, and we really get emotional when we feel that we are being understood. It is how we fall in love: through experiencing that finally, this person understands me! However, in the blog world, this sensation of mutual understanding is frequently built as much on our own mood at the moment, as on that other person's actual writing. And then, when we return to the blog of our loved one in times of stress, upheaval and fear, and the words we read appear to be angry, even critical of our own ideas... who can not take it personal!?

Problem is - the person who wrote didn't write considering the mood you would be in when you read, because a weblog writer knows only a very small (VERY small) number of the potential readership. Weblog writers may imagine your existance, but who would be able to imagine every nuance of your person? Still, when it does feel like you know eachother, it is because the writer of the weblog is able to communicate something universally human.

It is this communication of humanity that creates the links. While technology may make it more or less easy to keep updated on the writing of the other, while it makes it more or less easy to organise and retrieve information, the part about blogging that makes us return over and over, to rejoice or to disagree, is the knowledge that there is a human being at the other end there. Not somewhere far away in time, in some early stage of a publishing process. The human subject is close at hand, you can see the time stamp betraying when he or she touched the keyboard to write those words, and time and space shrinks and shrivels up, leaving you only a window or two away from that most enthralling and enfuriating creature of all: the fellow human being.

Crowned
Most appropriate for the Queen of blogs: Jill wears a crown.

A week-end off?
For a moment there, I thought I was ahead! I couldn't remember what I had planned for this week-end, I have already prepared the lecture for Monday, I have gotten up-to-date on the administrative work, I have started preparing for the next rush of lectures starting next week, I have sent off an article, I have even cleaned the house! Then I remembered why I have been working so frantically to free this week-end. I am having visitors and will spend quite a bit of time babysitting. Oh yes, I love my niece and nephew, but they have way WAY more energy than me. I am already looking forwards to a restful lecture monday morning...

Night and day
Somehow the way night crawls towards the little red or blue dots on World as a blog never ceases to amaze me. I am soon going home from work, it is afternoon, and the edge of night is almost here - but no, not quite yet! The sun has turned, spring is approaching and the curve is wider, more generous at the very top, in my cold, distant corner of the world.

Fun and games
I know they have been mentioned before and been there a little while already but hey, they are doing good and pouring out fun stuff! The Ludonauts may give us scraps and half-baked ideas, but personally I find that it is a good way to get a discussion flowing.

Blogged roar
"Who is Lori" is my uninformed question, when Kaye Trammell at "so is this mass communication" introduces a new blogger. But Lori enters life as a blogger with a loud stating of what some of us may think of as obvious by now. I still want to direct you all to it, because on the background of wonderchicken's much-linked punk-blog post, it is refreshing to see new live bodies plunge into the pool with such intensity.

A portent of change
Lately, I keep noticing this young man. After a week or two I noticed that he was always in the same place at the same time. He sits in the corridor downstairs, reading, quietly, patiently. Sometimes he holds a baby against his shoulder, sometimes he is rocking the pram where his baby is sleeping. Once I saw him with a woman, while she was breastfeeding the baby.

From these observations, I have constructed a story - a story of two young people, students, and their baby. They take turns looking after their child, and when she needs to be at the college for her lectures, but still wishes to breastfeed, he waits for her, reading his textbooks and looking after their child. He isn't there every day, which makes me think that they take turns looking after the baby and studying, sharing the burden equally. This is a new narrative of fatherhood, of partnership and of male/female roles, and I love it. If this is an example of tomorrow's fathers, perhaps something is changing for the better after all.

Virus alert!
Don't open any attachments from me right now, unless you have specifically asked for them! The college is being totally bombed by some virus, probably the MyDoom virus, but who really knows these days? Anyway: I am NOT sending out any unrequested attachments today.

Guilty pleasures versus real important stuff
My thesis ought to be good news for Lisa Clark-Fleischman, who writes about "Guilty pleasures: The shame of being a role player" in the 2003 fall issue of Daedalus. At the same time, I do recognize the problems she describes:

There is a definite public relations image challenge facing role-playing games. This is bad news for the game industry and hobbyists alike. Gaming has two faces in the public eye. One is a deviant criminal warning sign. The other, more disturbing because of the larger scope, is the social perception of gamers in a negative light. Both prongs are ugly and equally unnecessary, not to mention costly when one considers the missed opportunities of expanding the target market. So why aren't industry leaders howling for change?

In my own department I have received clear - if not official - notice that the research of games is wasteful, silly public sponsorship of a hobby, and it has nothing to do with the research profile of the department, which is democracy, public access and the freedom of speech. When I tell people what I study it is always with a certain defiance and a touch of fear. I have had former classmates pull out the wallet and offer me their money right away, rather than tapping their accounts through taxes and the public research funds - a demonstration of disgust and distaste of my work.

I read this as a demonstration of power. Roleplay is subversive, it channels energy into groups and organisations that avoid definition. It plays with symbols and signifiers, and reveals the strategies of society in order to explore, manipulate and question them. Because of this, roleplaying needs to be controlled and players need to be shamed into keeping their experiences safely in the private sphere, not as learning tools in the public sphere.

I would have loved to see role-play in the public sphere. Imagine the energy used on reporting football matches spent reporting role-play sessions? "Yesterday night, the Roaming Dragons staged a meeting of the United Nations. The player with the US representative character agreed that USA will pay all their dues to the UN, thus financing among aother things all of the asistance in Iran after the earthquake, as well as UNESCO's work to educate girls in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. The character playing the Turkish representative was so impressed with this move that he immediately agreed to introduce to his government the plan for integration and independence of the kurds in Turkey, the same plan that had been drawn up by the Arabian alliance in the previous role-playing session in December 2003." We could have had alternative readings of history, testing out of religions, governing structures and class conflicts, with players interviewed afterwards: "What did you really feel when you understood that your interpretation of democracy would fail, and the priests and the conservative/military coalision would win this evening?" Or: "So this time the world was blown apart through impatience and lack of interpretation of the portents. How will you avoid a similar outcome in coming role-playing sessions?"

Silly? Funny? Not any sillier than the questions directed at athletes, sweating, dribbling, exhausted after giving everything in order to run a marathon 20 seconds faster than some record. But that is public interest and important news, because people really want to know and people need heroes and role models. Right?

Reading
When I am not refreshing my knowledge of public relations theory, I am going in directions that surprise even me. Next to the stacks of required reading I have Flow; the classic work on how to achieve happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmyhalyi and Black Sun by Julia Kristeva, a work on depression and melancholia. By coincidence more than strategic choices, I am reading about creativity and artistic expression from two entirely - not to say opposing - positions. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as a sensation filled with a state of joy and creativity, while Kristeva explains creativity through loss, grief and melancholia. The challenge now is to figure out if they have anything in common at all, apart from their presence, by random accumulation, on the same desk.

On conflict
"conflict could not occur without communication." Jandt, p 71

Who knew this about PR?
I have spent a few years NOT reading anything written by Grunig, but now, as I am back to teaching the information students, I am back refreshing my knowledge of the four models of PR and the "excellence in public relations." For once though, I was really refreshed! Page 302 of the monster book concerns Gender and the PRactitioner - and the practitioner here is the PR practitioner. The ideal of excellent PR work is according to Grunig two-way symmetrical communication, and before this paragraph we have learned that only organisations where the dominant coalition is not afraid that new ideas should threaten their power use this model. Anyway, this is the passage that caught me:

Although feminine characteristics enhance the ability of the practitioner to practice the two-way symmetrical model, women - and perhaps men with feminine characteristics - often do not get into the managerial role where they can practice that model. Thus, Wtherell's study suggests that is crucial for women to develop strategies for overcoming the discrimination and socialization that keeps them out of the managerial role if organizations are to use their feminine characteristics to enhance the excellence of their public relations program.

Now of course I was quite annoyed at the idea that women have to develop those strategies. It's really the organisations that should do that, if they want to be better at PR, not the women, who already have more than enough to cope with developing strategies for getting into a position where they can start developing other strategies. But I was quite refreshed by a few other things. First, the writer was very clear that feminine characteristics is not exclusively something women has. Second, that the reason why organisations did not get the advantage of their women practitioners is that they don't give them the power they need to develop eutopia (now, we all knew that already, didn't we...). Third, that it's the men at the top who is the dominant coalition and who keeps the rest of the organisation in line and thus avoiding excellence.

I never was a big James Grunig fan. His work is much used and quoted though, and it is thorough to a degree that is quite impressive. But I may become a Larissa Grunig fan, as she is introducing PR practitioners to the existance of women in their midst, and even from a position right in the middle of one of the more massive bibles of PR. Yay!

Time for lunch
But NOT at McDonalds.

Issues in studying weblogs and games
This is a list of issues I need to clarify for myself this week. Preferably tomorrow afternoon.

• Democracy: Why blogs are important for the freedom og speech and support democracy is easy - but how does this connect to games?


• Social spaces: How to define an online social space and then research what happens and who participate?


• Games: where does the game and and the socialising begin?


• Weblogs: which definition to go with (that one is pretty easy, and I even know why.)


• Convergence media: what genres overlap, interact, influence and change weblogs? Games? And how does these genres influence the sphere around them?


• What do I want to do: book, articles, essay, documentary, hypertext, website?


• Connections and cooperation: got to get things together so I can actually express ideas to others.

New catches
Just added two interesting looking sites to my list of blogs. One found by way of Mark Bernstein is Makiko Itoh's i am makiko, i am not a nameless cat, and Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary. Makiko caught me with her description of realitity shows and the game aspect of them, a long, rambling but to a television and games addict (yes, I enjoy studying media) like me, very interesting post. Chuck Olsen just has a cool project, making a documentary on blogs. Well, that is journalism, documentary, blogs, new media, convergence and of course a touch of very human curiosity about whether anybody I know will be mentioned, right there. How can I not link to him? Enjoy!

The Postmodern Condition
The first five chapters of the 1979 edition of Jean-Francois Lyotard's book The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge can be found here.

Blog rock
This article is much linked, but it certainly deserves it! This describes perfectly, even to a woman who never really got the punk rock thing (I was gutting fish in a tiny west-coast town at the moment), that blogs are about power to the masses, not the academics or the organised media or the politicians with their officially appointed bloggers.

Hand in hand

"Can I hold your hand?" the honourable member of the board of the University asked her friend next to her. The academic procession, the procession that opened and ended the promotion, was strangely reminiscent of the lines we stood in at school waiting to be led back into the classroom after a break. I stood just behind the six members of the administrative board, first of the righthand line of Doctores, with Jill just behind me clutching her speech.

With a touch of cynicism I commented that this was the first, and probably the last time I wore a robe in an academic procession. A member of the board turned and grinned at me, pointing out that: "You can never know." Jill fell in love with the velvet robe of the headmaster, while I mostly worried whether I would remember the prior instructions. "Walk to the podium when the dean tells you to come forwards. Stand with the other Doctores on the podium. Step up to the headmaster and the university director when your name is called. Face the audience while the dean introduces you to the audience. Shake the hand of the headmaster and director when you get your diploma. Walk back to the others on the podium. Wait until all are done. Shake the hand of the dean as you pass him on your way back to your seat. Take the inside seat, because Jill needs the outside seat to get up and do her speech."

I almost started to cry during Jill's speech. She talked about starting out green and insecure. That was me. I never thought I would do it, I had absolutely no confidence in my academic ability, and although I was in the same office I had used for 7 years already and so knew perfectly well where the office equipment was stored I fell into a depression that lasted large parts of the first year. And here I was, clutching my diploma. My father was barely literate, and yet here I sat in this hall, holding in my lap the highest degree the Norwegian educational system could give me. He would have been making a fool of himself if he had been there. He would have videotaped everything, he would have been talking too loudly, he would have drunk too much of the white wine and shook hands, his calloused hands, hard as horn, against the soft and dainty hands of professors and deans. I missed him desperately, painfully aware that he would have understood nothing but been beaming with barbaric pride.

"That is my boy" the mother of my colleague pointed out to somebody who asked a question, "and the colour on his shoulder is purple. He is in media." "My parents are here," Jill told me. Perhaps out of solidarity she muttered "I don't think this is so important that they needed to be here, but they insisted." "I would have travelled much further than this for Erla's promotion" I assured her. But afterwards it was time to party, and after a dinner of tapas with Jill and Kate, my other Australian friend in Bergen, a little nap in the hotel room, it was time to celebrate Hilde's birthday. We celebrated and celebrated and celebrated, while Hilde's boyfriend carried booze and killed a large amount of the most highly specialised braincells in Bergen.

So many braincells died that night that the next morning, hurrying to reach the plane back home, I forgot the diploma that had made me weep the day before. It was found in the hotel though, and will soon be here.

Misbehaving
So, it seems like the ladies at misbehaving.net think I have misbehaved. Liz Lawley writes in her blog about catfights and unsheated claws, pointing to the comments on misbehaving. Well, I am just glad I kept the post that has been criticised in my own "bully pulpit" and didn't intrude on their space for my "singling out" of one person.

What I tried to do was to connect some statistics and research with a post by Danah Boyd, whose statement disagreed with the statistics. I "singled her out" because she was the one who wrote that bloggers seemed to be white males - not because of her particular habitus. I did however feel that her post and perceptions revealed something of her habitus: her position as a woman with interests in a field that is mainly male dominated.

Danah Boyd did not offer any support to her question but her personal experience. When we expose ourselves in this manner in a quick and not-so-formal environment such as this, once in a while things can feel a little more personal than if we get the reply to our statements half a year later in a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed journal. The discussions on misbehaving.net have made Danah Boyd and Elizabeth Lane Lawley post about blogs being unsafe spaces. Yes, they are. Sometimes even intelligent, experienced and high-profile bloggers like Elizabeth Lane Lawley read posts too fast. Reading the update to Liz Lawley's post on misbehaving.net you will find this:

Update: Ah. I just realized that Torill's probably referring to danah's post "why are bloggers mostly straight white men. That makes the post make a little more sense to me. I do note that danah specifically excludes LiveJournalers and other "journalers" from this characterization--which the Perseus study that Torill cites does not. In re-reading the comments to that post, I think danah does a pretty good job of qualifying her perception in the specific context. I don't think it's socialization that causes the perception that the visible technical and academic bloggers are primarily men.

The link to Danah Boyd's post was in my post all the time, nothing "probable" about that. I have been thinking about editing that post, because I saw that my language was Norwegianised and so seemed a little less precise than I desired. I will however leave it as is.

If I am wrong, and it is not socialisation that causes Danah Boyd's perception that the blogosphere is dominated by males, then fine, my assumption is wrong, or the definition of blog is wrong, or Perseus is wrong. But being wrong is something we have to deal with if we want discussion. And I thought we wanted that?

Happy birthday, Hilde!
And may the princess and heiress to the Norwegian throne, born on your birthday, live up to the expectations that come with your example!

Public or private
A case that escaped me when it was most active, brought to my attention by a colleague: A specialist in electronic warfare was accused of public anti-muslim opinions. He had published these on the internet. In Norway it is not permitted to harass people for religion or race, or to make public statements that can be deemed to be racist. In this case, the statements were considered racist according to the Norwegian criminal law. Synnevåg (the expert) had been encouraging others to harass and persecute muslims through an open news group.

There was no case against him, but he left his job with the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. Afterwards he sued the Norwegian Ethical and Humanist Union, Human-etisk forbund (HEF), for making the case against him that caused him to leave his job. His claim was that they had breached his privacy by gathering information on his opinions from newsgroups.

The judgement in this case was that HEF had done nothing illegal when they used the information from the newsgroup to make public the opinions of a researcher in a prominent public position. Newsgroups were considered public spaces, and what he had published in the discussion was considered to be in the public domain, not part of a private conversation.

Dreaming of elves
I haven't had a game-related dream in more than a year, perhaps two, but yesterday I woke up with a vivid memory of what I had just been dreaming. I was the half-elf wife of a human minor noble. It was a marriage of convenience, and we were both hoping to manipulate the other into becoming our puppet. I particularly vividly remember having used the element of surprise at the dinner table of some remote noble relatives. In my dream I seized him by the throath, sharp nails digging into the skin just by his adam's apple, while I softly promised him that...

I woke up there, the memory of his skin and the pulse underneath my fingertips clear enough to wonder if I had, in my sleep, seized a man by the throath. But my husband was peacefully asleep, and I had no idea what I was about to tell that man in his tacky velvet with too much gold embroidery.

The blog iceberg
A little late, but still interesting statistics for anybody interested in blogging: The Blogging Iceberg, a white paper by Jeffrey Henning at Perseus . This study puts this post by Danah Boyd at misbehaving.net into perspective.

The perseus results may indicate a potential error in the fact that people online can register and appear to an other gender than in the flesh world, but I personally don't think crossdressing bloggers are a statistically significant group. More interesting is the information that men don't maintain their blogs the same way women do. I keep hearing mentioned in passing that blogs are a women's medium. Yes, according to this research, 56% of the blogs surveyed were created by women. When the majority of the estimated 2,72 million abandoned blogs out there are abandoned by men, that makes blogging even more of a female dominated medium, with only 40,7 % of the active blogs created by men.

One likely explanation for the perception Danah Boyd has of men dominating the blogosphere, may originate in a male behavioural pattern online. That is likely, seeing that she is a Ph.D. student in Information Management and Systems at UC-Berkeley. To reach that far she needs to be socialised to have certain interests and disregard others - we all are by the time the educational system is done with us. Her perception of a male dominance of the blogosphere is in that case not a perception that holds true for the world of blogs, but for the world of accepted, academic writing and her own idea of what is interesting and important reading.

Prolonged rituals
I didn't think I had the time, but after a conversation with the dean and the headmaster of Volda College, and a phone call from the University Director's Office, I managed to find a spot in my busy schedule for a trip to Bergen, to the Doctoral Promotion January 23rd. Jill will be giving a speach on behalf of the PhD students at Bergen University! Could there be a better, quicker and better adapted speaker? I think not.

I had problems finding a hotel though, so I ended up at one of the really nice ones in Bergen Center. It will be a treat: a night in my favourite Norwegian town, seeing friends and having no duties but to smile in a friendly polite manner while wearing a robe, and it is still defined as work. But after this, I am definitely Dr. Mortensen, no more doubt. Well, at least if I manage to dig up the money for the doctors' ring. I imagine it is an absolutely neccessary accessory for knocking on the doors between me and an overwhelmingly bright future.

Right.

(Irony/sarkasm warning: the entire last piece of this post, particularly about the "doctor's ring" and the "overwhelmingly bright future" is meant to be read ironically. The whole situation is pretty ironic, as I had not planned to talk about this almost embarassingly odd part of the PhD rituals. Why am I there at all? Well, get an invitation, be in Håkonshallen Friday, find me, and I will tell you the story.)

Six Billion
By way of Grand Text Auto: six Billion, an online magazine of narrative journalism.

Dr. Juul
Two days late, but heartfelt: Congratulations to Jesper, The Ludologist, now Dr. Juul!

The edited history
Do you ever have a memory surface, in a painfully real glimpse, bringing with it the intense feeling of shame, humiliation, remorse or grief that you felt when you realised the true meaning of that event? I do, all the time. A word, a string of music, a scent, or perhaps nothing, just the batting of Chinese butterfly-wings, can bring up a split second of images I have attempted to supress.

Whenever I get one of those spells, I wish I could edit my past. I would like to do everything from deleting it all and starting over, to go in and correct different little episodes: five minutes spent preparing here, 10 seconds of thinking before I talk there, choosing a different route while driving to the swimming pool on a long-past winter's day, pausing to offer help rather than passing by a stumbling drunk in some far city. I face my prejudices and flaws in these penetrating glimpses of the past, hating it. Still I wonder: who would I be without it? I know my potential arrogance, my lack of patience and the promises too easily spoken, and these moments in retrospective shame keep me firmly planted in a strong resolve to avoid creating more such flashbacks for my own torment.

It worked!
And ooh, it worked! I showed up at "the World as a Blog"! Fun!

Five hours
Five hours of teaching today. It doesn't sound like much, but of course, us Norwegian have a special twist to torture a poor scholar. A Norwegian lecture at a college or university is supposed to be based on your own, original research, preferably done particularly for this class but at least something you, the teacher know intimately through your own efforts. It is supposed to relate this research to the topic the students are working on, and preferably be so packed with information that the students can write a textbook by taking notes. This means that after five hours, if my brain isn't swimming in its own juices, steamed by internal energy, I have done something very, very wrong.

But today is the last day of my personal hell-week this semester. It might get worse, but at least I haven't planned anything rougher for myself. Which means I can bitch about it, which always makes things easier to bear, you know.

The World as a Blog
I just added a geo URL to the template of this blog, so I can check what blogs exist in my immediate meatspace, and it it works out right thinking with my fingers should start showing up at World as a Blog when ever I post.

Social networks and research weblogs
Stephanie Nilsson from Umeå University, a blogger who was working on a paper concerning weblogs and social networks, has published her paper online: The Function of Language to Facilitate and Maintain Social Networks in Research Weblogs.

A very interesting paper, although I have to read the part about social and informational links again. I would have liked to know which weblogs she used to come to her conclusions about the difference between movable type blogs and blogger-blogs, or if she is talking about generic blogs - in which case I would like to know how many blogs she studied to come to her conclusion.

Pasta
Wholewheat pasta and a spicy, rich sauce, with meatballs. Yes, I am hungry.

Classroom blogging
The sound of hectic activity and frantically tapping keyboards surround me. After the first hour of frustrations, all students have found computers that work, have blogger accounts and figured out the basics of blogging. Now they are searching for good links, cooperating happily or suffering with the initial barriere to that first blogpost.

I made seven blogs, but we are only using five of them. Each blog has a topic, and two-three students have access to each blog. I have told them to start by writing a definition of their task, read the others' definitions, and then comment on those definitions. They all work at varying speed, but after a few "is this what you want us to do all week?" they are all working. Well, most, I think I have lost one, but that's an other matter.

The five blogs in question are Spill, Mobilitet, Digitalt Demokrati, Digital Organisasjon, Dokumentstrukturar and are Norwegian language blogs, of course.

I haven't had time to read through the posts some of my more hyperactive and argumentative students have posted already, but no matter how this works as a learning experience - I am having fun!

New York underworld
Satan's Laundromat has a long series of pictures from an abandoned subway tunnel. The subway has always amazed me. The NYC subway system transports as many people as the entire population of Norway in 36 hours. (It is an exhausting thought - everybody, children, people in hospitals, the elderly - all the people who live in Norway, would have to travel at least once every 36 hours if we were to keep a system like the NYC metro busy.) But the pictures from the abandoned tunnel show something very different - a haunted space, a monument of movement long ceased.

And in one of the pictures is a person - Steve - whose presence prompts a link to his site, undercity - a guerilla history of New York.

(Update: The pictures from the tunnels are from Newark, New Jersey, according to the guy behind Satan's Laundromat.)

Spam filters and coincidences
Sometimes, I think dark and angry thoughts about my Internet Service Provider. Today I logged into a mailbox I only use for a very few administrative tasks to do with the account. It is normally free of spam, with one or two emails to lists that annoy me because I know I said yes once and now I can't find the "I want to get out" button. Today the mailbox was stuffed with real CRAP!

Once I had deleted my way down the list to the real mail, I found, surprise surprise, an offer to test their spam-filter for free for a month.

Hmm.

Deep Play and Flow
Two different and still similar sounding references to play. Diane Ackerman on Deep Play:

Ancient people had their own forms of deep play, Ackerman said, and termed deep play to be rapture and ecstasy. "Rapture is being seized by force ... rape, ravage, usurp," she explained. "Ecstasy is a Greek word meaning a symbol of standing, or to stand, outside oneself. When you are experiencing ecstasy, you fly out of your mind and watch the known world dwindle in the distance."

and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow:

Mr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost."

Google-net
By way of Nick Montford at Grand Text Auto: TouchGraph GoogleBrowser.

An other view
D. Myers at anti-you, anti-me, anti-anti is quite critical of Castranova's recent article in Game Studies. Makes for interesting reading.

Dr Holmevik!
Congratulations, Jan Rune!



It is SO good to see one after an other of the people I have learned to know and love through this process of doing a PhD finish, get through the last rites, and become a Dr. Artium. Jan Rune is one of the few men in this group, eminently huggable. His warm personality and welcoming nature made my first days with those incredibly sophisticated Ph.D. students who did it the "right" way and not the hard and dirty way so much easier. Without Jan Rune, Espen, Jill and Hilde, I would have been so lost and never, ever found my way out of the abyss af almost done.

Escape
I will make my escape into reading, writing and museum/gallery visiting between March 12th and April 6th. That time will be spent in New York, just me and my laptop visiting my hiking boots. I will probably be writing something on blogs for blogtalk 2.0, or something on games just because I really had an epiphany the other day and know exactly what I want to write! I am already itching to start, and it's funny, but that makes me extremely organised around all the tasks that just need to be done before I get started. Feels good.

Progress
I was looking for something else, and in my archives I found this post. I am aware that I occasionally blog about the strain of being an academic, but the good thing about posts like that is to discover that yes, I get over the dark, impossible moments when oblivion seems like such a good idea and I worry that my hard disk is full. I do get back to working, and what I expect to be normal IS actually normal. The pain, stress and exhaustion is the anomaly, not the touch of satisfaction and even happiness.

So yeah, hereby noted, life is good at this side of the computer, and I am throwing myself into the new year and the tasks of teaching knowing full well it will drain me - and that I will come out this spring still on my feet.

New Cinema Symposium - France
In the Cinemathèque de Toulouse 2-4th of February, they arrange a symposium on new cinema, where they explore the connection between cinema and other visual media, such as videogames. Among the speakers are Espen Aarseth, Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin and Peter Chung. Another one of those events where a poor scholar would have liked to be. And this is one of those happening where said scholar would REALLY have liked to be present, and would have, if the chains of labouring in the auditorium did not hold a woman in such a harsh grip at the moment.

Videogames and cinema.

Colloquium the 2nd, 3rd and 4th of February 2004

Film Archive of Toulouse (Cinémathèque de Toulouse)

69 rue du Taur

31080 Toulouse

France

February 2004 is an important time in the life of the Film Archive of
Toulouse. Officially created on the 12th of February 1964, this February
marks it's the Film Archive's 40th birthday.

We wish to celebrate this birthday by organizing a 3 day colloquium on « the
hybrid form of images: emergence of a new cinema? ». This symposium is being
run in cooperation with the « PNR cinema of Toulouse » ('the National Pole
of cinema resources') which was created by the Department for Education.

The colloquium is based on an emergence of a new cinema which is very much
linked to other media such as video-game, Internet, comics, etc.

We anticipate discussion involving the recent movies: Matrix, Matrix
reloaded and Matrix Revolution as well as the Animatrix, EXistenZ, Avalon,
etc. These movies are widely viewed by the younger generation but many of
the older generation don't seem to be prepared to face these 'new' hybrid
images. One of the goals of this symposium is to facilitate a better
understanding of these films.

4 main forms of crossed images / hybrid pictures have been identified
within the academic community:

- The comment (like in ExistenZ, where the film takes a video games universe
as its backdrop)

- The quotation (The Beach, where Danny Boyle places Richard -played by L de
Caprio- into a computer game in the jungle)

- The adaptation (Tomb raider, Super Mario Bros, Mortal Kombat, Final
Fantasy, etc.)

- And remediation (where we find video game codes in movies. a theory
explained by R Grusin and D J Bolter in their book, Remediation,
Understanding new media).

This symposium is a remarkable as an opportunity to hear some of the
international specialists on crossed images and videogames talk on this
subject for the first time in France, These specialists include: Richard
Grusin (GIT), Jay David Bolter (GIT), Angela NDalianis (Melbourne), Margaret
Robertson (Edge Magazine), Espen Aarseth (Copenhagen), Peter Chung
(Director- Animatrix), etc.

More details: www.lacinemathequedetoulouse.com

[CV of the speakers and their abstracts available in English]

Further details: ludovic.graillat@ac-toulouse.fr [the organizer of the symposium]

Traceback: MOO, Open Source, and the Humanities
Here is the press release (In Norwegian) for Jan Rune Holmevik's PhD and defense. Jill blogs the schedule for the lectures of Jay Bolter (first opponent) and Scott Rettberg (guest), who are both in Bergen at the time.

Blogs too
This year, I am using blogs in teaching, too. Not at all like Jill , Pattie Belle and Dennis, they focus mainly on blogs as genre and tool, but as a simple trick to make a space available for my students while they work on a net task. I have no great ambitions of creating new bloggers, or of teaching them to write this way. We force our students to write from day one, for print, for the net, press-releases and student papers: one of the largest strains on the teaching staff in this Media Department is reading/listening/viewing/attending student work.

And now they are supposed to blog. That is because they have net-related tasks, and I want them to solve them through linking: searching, linking and writing short summaries and quick comments.

It's only going to last three days, I am using blogspot blogs which I have already set up for them, and I will be available pretty much all the time. But I think it will be fun!

The secret defense
I received an email this Christmas with an invitation to Bergen (one I sadly have to decline, If I survive the workload of the next two months that will be due to pure stubbornness) to be present at Jan Rune Holmevik's defense.

Making a search for the trial lecture and defense brings up nothing. The University of Bergen page of Doctoral defenses in 2004 is empty, as is the news-section of the section of Humanistic Informatics, which is where Jan Rune has been a doctoral candidate. But the place and date is:

Humanistic Faculty Building (HF-bygget) Auditorium B, University of Bergen:
Trial lecture January 8th at 16.30
Defense January 9th at 10.15

What I can't find is a description of his PhD project, which is a pity, because Jan Rune is a versatile and multifaceted scholar, and I am really not sure what his doctoral thesis is about! He is however a wizard of linguaMOO and a co-editor with Cynthia Haynes of the book HighWired, he works with the use of MOOs in education and was the chair of DAC2000 in Bergen. He is also one of the few people in computer studies who talks right, coming as he does from a narrow fjord nearby, one which I have to admit might be even more pittoresque than this one.

So... who do women play with?

Barbie adventures
Through The Gothamist I found these links to barbie-doll pictures: Barbie version of the Paris Hilton sex video and Barbie menaced by household appliances.

Castranova on Virtual Economies
In his article in Game Studies, On Virtual Economies, Edward Castranova introduce significant insights in between his insistance on using words like "synthetic worlds" and "virtual worlds". It is fascinating to me how he manages to keep using words indicating that what happens in a game world is something beyond reality, at the same time as his articles position games as very much within and with a significant impact on the flesh world.

Many others, however, approach virtual worlds as an alternative reality, devoting a substantial fraction of their time to them. According to a survey in Summer 2001, about one third of the adult players of EverQuest spent more time in a typical week in the virtual world than in paid employment (Castronova, 2001a).

However, I find that when I translate virtual, alternative and synthetic with digital, online or computer mediated, I get drawn into the level headed analysis of the economic impact of games. Castranova realises that a game economy is different from a national economy, and that the a game cannot be a model for a flesh world economic structure, no matter the amount of simulation built into the game.

In cyberspace, the coding authority does indeed have the power to create and destroy any amount of any good, at virtually zero cost. Therefore, as a de facto government, the coding authority can indeed control prices. And, therefore, price controls may actually be good policy in cyberspace, even though they most certainly are not good policy on Earth.

The insights which make me enjoy reading this article relate to the first gaming article by castranova, the one that made such an impact on the game study community. It is the understanding that games is a commodity just like everything else, and a commodity that changes the quality of life. Castranova compares making and playing games to building and driving cars:

If virtual worlds do, in fact, grow as a human phenomenon, there may be some implications for Earth economies. It is important to recognize from the start that the mere fact that Earth economies may suffer as people spend more time in cyberspace, does not imply that humanity is worse off. The fact that labour hours that were once producing automobiles are now producing avatars does not mean anything about the level of wealth in society. The basket of produced goods is simply changing. A proper accounting would show, in fact, that the actual production of well-being per capita is rising.

This points to the fact that it may not be the object: the car (or the washing machine, the cellphone or the swimming pool) which is important, but the experience of being able to aquire and use - or play with - these objects. This connection between games in the flesh world and games in the digital world is illustrated by Castranova's equation, where he illustrates his example by describing game A ar the flesh world game of work:

Game A happens to be the always-exciting Work Game of Earth, where you go to the office and face the challenges, denoted by C, that are presented by your boss, your co-workers and your competitors, and where overcoming those challenges garners you rewards, denoted by R, in the form of wages, perks, fringe benefits and assorted entertainments involving the office copy machine.

A large part of the article is concerned with predictions of how games will develop and impact the flesh world, based on economic models and connections between the interests of the producers and that of the players. Parts of this I see as speculation - it might be informed guesswork, but still - predicting the future is always risky... The most important insight, in the light of the direction of debates on Terra Nova, where Edward Castranova is a a moderator, comes in the conclusion:

A common theme throughout the paper is that the analysis of virtual economies will require slightly different tools and approaches than we are used to. The differences are dictated by the specific features of life in cyberspace. In virtual worlds, the entire physical universe is open to direct and costless manipulation by the owners of the game. The human beings behind the avatars are real, and physical, and subject to the laws of Earth, but the avatars themselves do not inherently face any physical constraints at all. The discovery and description of avatar-mediated economic life represent the most important current research avenues in the economics of games.

Games are part of the real world and have always been! But at the same time they are distinctly different. Games can give us some insights to the nature of humanity and society, but they can't explain it all. And it is very reassuring to see Edward Castranova write it out, at the end of such a lucid discussion of the connection between time and money. Which, to me, is what it all comes down to: the base for industrialised society, the pricetag on our time.

I blinked
And so I missed the launch, despite the fact that I knew it was coming. The second 2003 issue of Gamestudies is out, and with articles on virtual economics, grand theft auto and delicious further contemplation.

Blogging in Bay Ridge
A new blog, //opened source, found while checking New York bloggers for new blogs on the R-line. This one is interesting of its own right, as it discusses games and cyberpunk! Perfect! Doesn't have much of an archive though, so I'll be watching it with interest, to see if it keeps up.

The gift of lust
I close my eyes and make a wish. This year I wish not for love, not for safety and not for warmth, but for lust, devouring passion, wild driving desire. Nothing pushes me, I live through routine, mechanically, coping well, and with no craving for more.

But I need more. I need fear and hurt and pain to chase me into weeks of frantic activity, accomplishment and satisfaction. I need something to pull me up this long uphill slope I live on. I need lust, lust in the new year.

May you all be blessed with it, and never fully sated.

Why should it be more than a game?
I am currently reading Barry Atkins' book More Than a Game. At first glance I was quite enthusiastic, but I have trained my own gaming assistant who has a surprisingly clear and critical gaze on the things that interest him. My teen-age son took one glance at the list of games and claimed that it was leaning heavily towards first person shooters, that the Sims does not make up for the lack of good strategy games, and Half-Life isn't a game I should use to demonstrate that genre for my students, I should use CounterStrike.

As I started to look more closely at the book, I found some other flaws. For a book that wishes to address the debate of games as scholarly object, the reference list is surprisingly clean of scholarly works on computer games. Considering that it is published in 2003 and probably written in 2001, the book still ought to have references to Aarseth, Bolter and Grusin, Jenkins and Murray, even if Atkins may have been doing his work too early to discover the existance of Game Studies and the entire debate on analysing computer games.

These issues aside: for a book addressing computer games outside of the ongoing debates on the topic and without references to relevant literature and with experience from a certain type of games - it is surprisingly good! Barry Atkins has lucid presentations, he has a clear understanding on the (somewhat outdated) problems of game scholarship, and he is enthusiastic about gaming. I read it with a feeling of having been there - somewhere back in the last millennum, when I was just starting to study and write about games. It is an interesting book that holds its own within its limitations, and I am reading it with interest and perhaps a touch of nostalgia.

I am however a little miffed at the title. Computer games do not need to be more than a game, and the way I read this book, Barry Atkins and I agree on that.

Magic Light
Saturday, the sky appeared to be blue, but when we looked closer it was a weird, greyish blue that had nothing to do with the cool, clear skies of frosty winter days. The sun shone, and the snowy peaks of surrounding mountains were bright shining pyramids of light against the weird sky, rising above the dark mountainsides and the lead-grey fjord.

The phenomenon was odd, and could only happen where the sun barely clears the peaks of the mountains in daytime: the cloud cover was so high up the sun shone under it and lit it up from below! The few dots of fog were pale cotton puffs against the cloud-cover, and appeared like light summer clouds against the sky, only this was a cloudy winter sky.

It turned the landscape into a magic place outside of season and time, the kind of weather that might be considered an omen, good or bad, I don't know. Good, I hope, as the light lit the clouds from both sides... but it might also be bad, the warning from the Matrix of ruined skies and heavens controlled by beings other than mankind.

Still, without doubt, it was pretty.

Sitting down
A while ago Jill, me and several others, among those Liz Lawley and Dennis G. Jerz, sent our writing through gender-detection software. We all had texts that came out both as male and as female. Typically for the texts that came out as written by men was that they were written in the authoritative voice of scholarship - it was the voices we use when we talk about the topics we really know something about, something other than our private lives and emotions, and on fields where we are authorities. Also, it was when we made conscious attempts to conform to the writing in fields where men are supposed to dominate.

So, Edward Castranova runs the texts from a Dominant Woman at a BDSM site through the gender-check software, and finds that she is male:

And there's the added benefit that, in collecting the data, the company has some weapons to go after the behaviors that are messing up Sims Online. Example: I took text from Lady Julianna's writing at the Alphaville BDSM site Black Rose Castle (found through Ludlow's Alphaville Herald BDSM interview) and ran it through a gender-detection engine. OK, so Lady Julianna is a man. Doesn't really mean anything here, but it opens interesting potentials and problems.

If somebody writes with authority about something they know - suddenly they are male? Gentlemen... really.... think again. Writing in a way the gender-recognition software recognizes as a male does not require male genitalia.

Christmas Eve
It is Christmas Eve that is the big day for Norwegians, and I have been working like crazy the last few days to have everything ready for tonight. Still, with everything I don't mean everything the way my mother did it. When I grew up I spent the afternoons and evenings helping out in a house where Christmas preparations went on from November.

My mother would buy the side of a sheep and make "rull" - a sausage-like meat for cuts, spicy and flavourful unlike anything commonly associated with Norwegian cooking. Her "sylte" - the pork version of the same things - was also sharp and offered a mixture of cloves, nutmeg and pepper to cut the fat meat. I learned to stuff, roll and sew these meats before I was 12, and they would swim in salt, under pressure, until they were frozen before christmas. In cold years they would just be left on the verandah, covered to keep the crows off them. My mother would never stop at seven types of cakes. She would have a long long list which always started and ended with pleskener, a simple lady-finger like cookie. She would make them early in December, and the first batch would be gone long before Christmas. But in the mean time she would make berlinerkranser, sandkaker, sollikjeks, lefser, sandnøtter, fattigmenn, julemanna (julemenn), mandelpletter, sirupssnipper and four or five other types with names I can't remember, before she made doughnuts, a night-long session where she rolled them out and my father cooked them, and then ended it all with a final batch of pleskener again.

From this I learned to wield a rolling pin, to organise the kitchen, to plan for several processes simultaneously, and to have way too much in the kitchen cabinet compared to what a normal modern family needs... And I got a fixation on cookie tins, which still pulls me into antique shops and makes me buy chocolates and cookies I don't really want because they are in such incredibly neat tins.

When the last cakes were baked, the cleaning would start. In my mother's house there was no mercy at this time. I am pretty sure that I might have had much better grades in high-school if she had been a little more easygoing about Christmas, because every December, just as all others were preparing for their final exams, I was cleaning. I was emptying out closets, cupboards and cabinets, cleaning walls and ceilings, taking the covers off all the cushions, cleaning them and stitching them back on - by hand, of course, it had to be invisible! This is also when I got my first repeated stress injuries in shoulders and arms - I would have aching, clumsy arms and hands by the time of the final tests at school, barely able to hold the pen. It wasn't until I was at the University and didn't have all those tests before Christmas but still returned home to clean the house, that I realised it wasn't the writing that did it to me at all, but the cleaning: evenings spent scrubbing down a new room in my mother's large house.

All these preparations were not in vain. Ours was a large family, and we carried cakes and slices of meat to relatives, old, sick or just too busy to make some "real" christmas food. The house on Christmas Eve would smell like a mixture of pine, spice and soap, and when we came up from the sauna to dress and carry the presents into the livingroom and put them under the tree we would be cleansed as was the house, ritually for the turn of the sun. It carried with it a feeling of being born again, being new and ready, having achieved something vital, something that would ensure the birth of the new sun and bring the light back to the earth. When we feasted on all the riches prepared for this long, long night, it was with wild abandon and with the knowledge that we had done it all, all that we could, and it had all been done right.

The best thing of being an adult with two almost adult children is that I can make my own decisions about these Christmas traditions. I can decide just how much I want to clean. I still like to have a clean and tidy house, and I force my children to help with the pre-christmas chores, but I haven't cleaned a ceiling in this house since we moved in. I will soon have to, it's starting to look a little grey, but I will do it sometime this summer or spring, when there is a lot of light, when I can leave doors and windows open, a summer cleaning at my own leisure. I can also bake JUST as much as I like. OK, so I like baking a little more than strictly needed, and who really needs seven types of cookies these days, but it's fun! And some traditions, like the ginger-bread house, have become too important to ignore.



But I don't change all the tablecloths for christmas-themed ones, and I don't have crates and crates of decorations to fill up every corner of the house. I don't even have special Christmas curtains for the kitchen. And I certainly don't have salted, dried mutton ribs for Christmas dinner. For Christmas we have, of all things, turkey, lean gentle meat that agrees with adults and children alike. And my cake this year is a carrot cake decorated in the least Christmassy colours I could find in the cabinet.

Still - I have done all that I could. I have done it with all the energy I have, and my offering to the new sun is all of my spare time and a house prepared as I find most fit for the celebration this night. And we will eat, drink , sing, walk around the Christmas tree and give presents lovingly chosen and wrapped. I will bring cookies to share with my relatives and I will taste theirs, careful not to "carry the Christmas away from the house" by refusing to take part in what hospitality is offered me. The midwinter feast is all about light, hope and the return of life to this bleak, stormwhipped land, and it is a task we all take part in, as we know best.

Sjokolademakroner
500 gram mandler
200 gram kokesjokolade
8 eggehviter
400 gram sukker

Mal mandlene og riv sjokoladen. Stivpisk eggehvitene og sokkeret, så blander du alt forsiktig med en slikkepott. bruke teskjei og lag små kladder på brettet (husk bakepapir). Steik i 15 - 18 minutter på 150 grader Celcius.

Når du lager dette får du en MASSE eggeplommer til overs. Her er noe du kan gjøre med det:

Marengs med eggeplomme
3 eggeplommer
1 spiseskjei vann
4 desiliter melis
1/4 teskjei hortetakksalt
1 teskjei vaniljesukker.

Garnering: grovhakkede mandler.

Rør eggeplommer og vann. sikt melisen og ha den i. Visp massen kraftig til den er tykk, lys og porøs. Tilsett hjortetakksalt og vaniljesukker. Sett deigen med skjei smurt og melet stekebrett elelr på bakepapir. Strø over mandelhakket. Stek kakene ca 20 minutter ved 150 grader Celcius.

Den første oppskriften blir temmelig mange kaker, men den andre kan trygt dobles.

The Meatrix
In these times of over consumption - The Meatrix!

Colours and me
I have taken this test three times now, and unlike Cyborgmommy always come out the same - bright and glaring yellow!

you are yellow #FFFF00

Your dominant hues are red and green, so you're definately not afraid to get in and stir things up. You have no time for most people's concerns, you'd rather analyze with your head than be held back by some random "gut feeling". Your saturation level is very high - you are all about getting things done. The world may think you work too hard but you have a lot to show for it, and it keeps you going. You shouldn't be afraid to lead people, because if you're doing it, it'll be done right. Your outlook on life is very bright. You are sunny and optimistic about life and others find it very encouraging, but remember to tone it down if you sense irritation.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

That warm fuzzy feeling
The official Christmas cards are flowing into the department. Since I am horrible at card-writing and all that, I don't get many, but one found its way into my drawer today. I almost got worried, because it was from the Norwegian Data Inspectorate, and my first thought was: What did I do now?

It turned out I had done something good! A person called me this autumn, asking me please recommend a former student who might need a short term job. A few phones and I found a graduated student who fit his specifications, and told her to call him. Then I called back to him and told him he would have a phone-call. Three minutes of work, and it was up to them to figure out if they wanted each others' skills and tasks.

I am not an agency for job-matching, but I like to see my former students in jobs that suit them, and I love making peoples' lives easier. The Christmas card today shows that I now have not only one but two friends in the data inspectorate. Who knows when that can be useful!

Christmas preparations
For those of my friends out there that worry about the traditional Christmas in the home of Dr. Mortensen: I have two types of cookies to go to finish the traditional 7 types - eggyolk meringue and coconut macaroons, both to be produced on popular demand from eager family members. I am afraid that my gingerbread house will not have as much personality as Jill's. After all, my kids by now have a super efficient approach to gingerbread-house decorating, among other things includes eating all the non-stop before they reach the roof of the house.

Learning from students
One of the good things about this period of assessing students is all the things I learn. Even the most boring load of low-level droning papers can teach me something about what students understand from textbooks, lectures and comments made to them. Reading the exams tells me about the curriculum, what should be adjusted, where we should make an effort to teach more or clearer next time around and where we pershaps should find some newer or more precise literature.

I am also learning a lot about methodology, of writing and structuring a paper, of different genres in paper writing and of the importance of those structures I sometimes feel like I am repeating to the extent of absolute boredom. I know how to spot a flawed hypothesis in three sentences, and I can tick the most common errors in most humanistic and social science theories and methodologies on my fingers at a moment's notice. Exams can do one thing: make professors better!

From the most recent batch of papers I have also had the incredible blessing of starting to think about two central concepts to my own work: flow and immersion. There is an immersion article out ther ewaiting to be written, and it should be coupled with among other concepts: flow. The working title in my head at the moment is seduction, immersion, flow and satisfaction. Of course, it is all about games, and it is all about pleasure, the pleasure of letting go. It's an article I have wanted to write for years, and it will be an essay written for my own pleasure, using my pet references. Just thinking of it makes me smile.

It's been a while since the thougt of writing and building a scholarly argument made me feel eager and happy. No matter if I finish this, just recognizing the feeling and cherishing it, in the middle of the chaos before Christmas, is really, really GOOD.

Almost there (is that where I want to be?)
A surprising little email this morning:
I thought you would be interested to know that your blog is #15 in our weekly BlogSpot hosted sites poll. That leaves it just out of the running for this week, but frequently when a blog is close, it makes it in at a future point. We rely on Google to do the choosing and limit the search to BlogSpot sites and to the prior one-week period.

Take a look at www.bloggerforum.com in the right-hand column to see this week's Top Ten.

Congratulations on having a site that Google considers extremely important in this past week.

Regards, --Steve Covell
www.bloggerforum.com

So google considers me extremely important. I am - hmm - baffled?

Never in a Winter's Night
I have been good today, done a LOT of work - so I was going to have some fun and install Never Winter Nights on the new computer. But instead of a fun night of game playing and work combined I got a really weird problem. It looks like somebody grabbed the right hand side of the image on the screen and dragged it around the back of the screen and back to wrap around at the left hand side of the screen. Weird, unexplicable and very frustrating. I have of course written support and asked what can cause this, but it's getting towards midnight and I have wasted an other couple of hours on making Never Winter Nights work on one of my computers, so that I can play it and assess Jill's students.

I am learning a few things thought from this, valuable if I manage to get my multimedia editing course running: students must submit their work in standardised formats, decided on and tested by the staff. The neccessary software must be supplied free of cost by the University or College when using external assessors. And assessing games/multimedia products/cybertexts needs to pay differently from the standard rates used for a 15 page paper.

Advent surprise
Almost 10 pm, and the doorbell rang. I was tired from struggling with Neverwinter Nights - something I have to do right now, yes, it is work, and I have to play. Anyway - I was kind of tired with technology that doesn't work. And then it arrives. Oh baby, my new love! A new computer, lcd screen, dvd burner, photo printer... I cleaned out of the computer room, for a year now the den of husband and son, the air almost unbreathable and I don't know when we last saw the floor. This room is now shining clean, and I have decided to make new curtains and am considering the wallpaper... perhaps something slick and past 2000 to match the computer. Yep, I am planning to move in here!

Saving the world
from a lack of grades and oral assessments. Will be back once mission is accomplished.

A moment's quiet
I had a list of things I wanted to write down - things accomplished before I took a break. But in the multi-directional reality of life, a break is not a break, and the first time I wrote the first sentence, I didn't manage to write "I took a break", instead I wrote "before the phone rang", thinking I wrote "I took a break", because it did ring after I had written the first half of that first sentence, and suddenly all the things I had already finished were insignificant compared to the things left to do.

Confused? Not after the next episode in Dr. Mortensen's office life...

girls and books
By way of Cyborg Mommy - these weird and wonderful pictures.

What I might remember
If I was hypnotised to remember who I was in some former life, who knows who I could have been? No limits to the splendour my mind could come up with, but somehow I don't think I was anyone remembered by posterity.

Perhaps I was the fourth wise person. I never got mentioned, because I wasn’t a wise man, but a wise woman. I was the one who asked for the way when we were lost, the one who remembered to pack a spare blanket and a bag of treats for those moments on the trail when you really need some extra energy.

When the men went to speak to King Herodes in Jerusalem, I visited with the wife. She told me what the king would do if he learned where the newborn king of men was. Of course I had to make it sound like an angel told me – and she was pretty enough to be one – but at least they listened.

In the stable the others brought gold, incense and myrrh. Nobody remembered what I brought to Maria. I had warm clothes for the child and the mother, food for them all, herbs and little things a woman needs. While the others admired the baby, I cleaned and cooked, and told Maria she needed to make sure they got out of there quickly, since the King in Jerusalem would be looking for her baby.

I was forgotten, as the wise women tend to be. The three wise men have been celebrated through the centuries. I was lucky to live when I did – I was ignored, but not burned.

It looks pretty
Yeah, I know, I live in what looks like paradise. Anybody who envy me are invited to come and clean the pretty white stuff off the drive-way. I'll even serve coffee after a job well done.

A very elegant defense
According to sources in Oslo, present at Anders' defense, it was "elegant". How could it not be? I wish I could have heard it, as it is I will just have to say congratulations, Dr. Fagerjord! Party well, you deserve all the praise and glory and flowers and presents coming your way today!

Short term memory - and I mean short
It is totally shot. Too much information yelling for attention. I carry little pieces of paper to tell me what I was going to do when I go to do copies, fetch printouts, get a glass of water or give a message, and I have turned calendar keeping into a rigid discipline. It always happens when I get stressed - it's how I know I am doing too much.

Neverending...
Have to take a day off, in the middle of the pre-Christmas chaos, to see my mother's doctors and nurses. She broke her thigh-bone and was operated Sunday. Priorities shift, endlessly, as the flow of life shifts about me.

Strolling about the Metaverse
I just read through Cory Ondrejka’s article (pdf) linked from a post at Terra Nova, and it was intriguing. Cory, I agree with a lot of your points, and they correspond with what I have found studying MUDs. I do however not agree that the Metaverse is a MMORPG.

As far as I am concerned, the Metaverse is the web itself. While Stephenson's vision does not overlap Gibson's vision and the concepts Cyberspace and Metaverse may not be synonyms, they are more closely related than the Metaverse and computer games. I find that limiting the Metaverse to the different graphic games limits, as you argue excellently in your paper, the user - or inhabitant - in a manner that runs counter to the desire for personal expression and creativity.

But when your article opens with: "However, despite the enormous technical advances of the last decade, the concept of a broadly appealing online world has not yet been realized." I wish to point out that the image of the Metaverse can be restrictive as well as inspiring. The Metaverse and Cyberspace are metaphors for how the web CAN be used and developed, not how this will or should happen.

1) It might be that graphic interfaces are not the ideal medium for the expression of user creativity. At the moment graphic interfaces rule the net because we have few other technical options. A world where we navigate by sound or by touch may be as efficient, as soon as the technology supports that. While visual interfaces rule out most other simultaneous operations, sound lets us sort through and focus by utilizing the much more efficient selective perception through the ear. Our eyes can only see in one direction at the time - our ears have no such restrictions, nor does our three-dimensional bodies. A lot of our physical interface with the real world depends not on vision, but on the sensations of the body.

2) I think there is already a budding Metaverse out there, an online space where people express themselves freely, dependent on their abilities and desires. MMORPGs are part of this, but not all of it, nor even the most important aspect. It is called the internet. All the different communication clients and clients for interaction and experimentation are parts of this Metaverse - the digital space of human interaction.

Being of the firm belief that computer games push the development of the computer industry and technology forwards innovatively and as a good alternative to the weapons industry (even if they at times overlap) I have great sympathy with the MMORPG=Metaverse analogy. But I think the present-day computer games are still just one more step towards realising the full potential of computer-generated communication.

No increasing violence
Just found an article about violence between 1990 and 1999 in Norway. Turns out there has been no increase in serious violence: that is intended harm and serious harm. There was an increase in reporting less serious violence - what we call "body insults" (legemsfornærmelse) in Norway, but as harm in these cases was minor and the result of accidents, it is not reported as violence. As for violence among young people: the ratio of violent youths and violent adults remains stable. There has been an increase in certain groups, such as ethnic minorities in large cities, but not among youths in general. Youths have shown the same decrease in violence as adults.

The article is from 1999, so I don't know about 1999-2003, but still - if video, internet, television, cinema etc was to blame for the increase in violence... it's not like it should decrease in the nineties, hmm?

communication
Just found this information, which might be relevant when jill wants to use sms and not email in USA: According to the CIA factbook, Norway has as many internet users as cellphone users. In the USA the number of internet users is ten times that of cellphone users. Now that information is a little dated, Norway now has more than one cellphone pr inhabitant, which means approcimately 5 mill cellphones.

Yes, it looks like I am back
Since 1998 I have been only partially involved in the exams at the department. Before that I was normally not only one of the examinators, but the person to arrange, administrate and be responsible for one the most demanding and largest (most students) exams. This exam is just before Christmas, and as a result I would always be sick for Christmas. From 1992 until 1998 I was in bed, sick, most of the Christmas holiday. The woman who has been doing the job I used to do is already on a sick leave before the rush has even started.

I almost forgot about this until this year. This year I am fully back to teaching and expected to pull the customary load at the end of the fall term. So if you don't hear from me until January I am either grading papers, doing oral assessments or sick with fever. Quite possibly all at the same time; been there, done that.

Queer musings
Randomly sampling blogs for an article, and I come across no milk, please. It's really funny, weird and smart and mixed up. See what a diamond can do!

Bourdieu and the role of intellectuals
I would like writers, artists, philosophers and scientists to be able to make their voice heard directly in all the areas of public life in which they are competent. I think that everyone would have a lot to gain if the logic of intellectual life, that of argument and refutation, were extended to the public life. At present, it is often the logic of political life, that of denunciation and slander, 'sloganization' and falsification of the adversary's thought, which extends into intellectual life. It would be a good thing if the 'creators' could fulfil their function of public service and sometimes of public salvation. (Bourdieu 1998:9)

Pierre Bourdieu (1998): Acts of Resistance Against the New Myths of Our Time, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Laboratories and real worlds: Games and positivism
The debate at Terra Nova is taking a turn that exposes one of the problems I have with a lot of game scholarship. Edward Castranova states, in a reply within the "fascism is fun" thread:

Alek: "But I am really scared by the idea, that studying an artificial social reality, with it's basic assumptions - an ontology of sorts - so different from real world societies, might give a simple answer to a question that social sciences are meticulously researching in these - allow me to say this - more real societies."

I guess, contra Alek and Nick and a few others, that I'd prefer not to allow you to say this. I believe the essential forces of economics emerge whenever humans interact under conditions of scarcity and specialization of resources. The essential forces of sociology emerge whenever individuals sort themselves into groups. The essential forces of politics emerge whenever the structure of resources and groups create collective interests, issues that everyone cares about but that need to be resolved by the community as a whole, through designated leaders.

With this, as I understand Edward Castranova, he claims that games can give directly relevant information about human interaction, and act as a testing ground for theories, to see how they work in society, and he considers the more cautionary voices to be dismissing games as a field for learning about human interaction. This is a positivistic view on games, where games are treated like the laboratories of the behaviourists. Castranova does not appear to be aware of the failure of the skinner box or the staged experiments on human violence and media influence (Noble 1975) as he argues for his view of the general validity of the forces of economics:

But the claim that generalizing is impossible, or only allowable for trivial aspects of behavior ("when thrown together into community, people argue"), goes much too far, I think. It's very easy to dismiss the goings-on in a virtual world as a tempest in a teapot, or as 'just a game,' or 'virtual and hence not real.' I mean, what makes political engagement 'real'? Surely the touchstone cannot be the realness of the objects in question; people have had bitter politics over lots of intangible things, from flag colors to communion wafers.

My stance on this is that we can learn a lot about human behaviour from computer games. But what we learn is about human behaviour in this given context. Humans behave differently in different situations, and we are intelligent enough to realize that being part of a research project, for instance, is a different situation from our every day life. This is one of the main sources of errors for researchers who work with human beings and the human condition. It is one of the reasons why so many people have spent so much time and resources trying to answer the question: "are the media dangerous?" If we agree with Edward Castranova, that behaviour in games tells us how people will behave in the flesh world given a similar situation, then please, PLEASE forbid Grand Theft Auto and all other games that promote violent, aggressive, destructive behaviour!

Human beings are too complex for human behaviour to be understood through the limited study of behaviour in games. That does not mean that we cannot learn significant things about the games, or that games are not important. Try to tell athletes, sports fans or just amateur players of sports that playing their particular game: football, volleyball, handball, is not important! Try to interrupt a game of chess between two dedicated players! Try to crash a LARP, fool around, break it up, and see how understanding the players will be! Games carry immense significance, have a symbolic power and yes, economical power, but this meaning is not directly transferable to any other arena.

This is why I think games - also computer games - need to be studied: Because we don't really understand their significance. We know they are important to human beings, we know they generate activity, creativity and even conserve sanity, they build understanding and social skills, they promote understanding, cooperation and healthy competitiveness, but we don't really know why, how, where, when. There is no such thing in my book as "just a game". But that is also why I don't think they are just an other part of the same trivial everyday behaviour mode.